We can certainly agree that the UK has underperformed relative to, say, America. I don't think Chinese GDP stats have ever been accurate and developing countries often have high growth anyway, so am not so interested in comparisons to that. But certainly it can be compared to the US and there we see poor relative performance, and indeed the same is true of Europe in general.

Comparing UK growth to the EU average isn't so useful because the EU contains a lot of countries still catching up from decades of Soviet rule. Poland posts 6% GDP growth but that doesn't mean it's a richer country than the USA, obviously. That sort of thing skews the average upwards. That's why I plotted the EU line but also more comparable non-ex-Soviet countries. German GDP was historically boosted by their fixation with subsidizing the rest of the EU with cheap exports, leading to their massive Target2 imbalances. That is nearly a sort of broken windows fallacy style of growth so those figures also have to be taken in context.

But these things aren't anything to do with Brexit, and the UK isn't really so different to comparable western European countries. Their growth is all within narrow bands on that graph, especially from 2017. Indeed the poor growth rates inside the EU were one of the arguments made for why leaving is a good idea! EU policy leads to poor growth, so went the argument and therefore by leaving, the UK can change policies to go faster and catch up with the USA. Of course the mere act of leaving doesn't make that automatic - it's necessary but not sufficient, and it's unclear if the other conditions will ever be satisfied (primarily social attitudes towards capitalism are the problem, imo). Brexit actually taking effect happened simultaneous with the appearance of COVID and then the government was dominated by that, so very little of what's theoretically possible has been done, and now of course the economy is trashed due to lockdowns so who knows when or if the a more US style approach can ever be implemented. But it is at least now theoretically possible.

> But it is at least now theoretically possible.

I have the opposite opinion. I think the UK has been historically hamstrung by its desire to ape the US. The US is a continent-spanning superpower, the dollar is the world's reserve currency, and the US economy is the largest in the world. That means that a lot of the things the US can do, vis-a-vis policy, the UK cannot. Copying a nation that is on basically in a class of its own in every particular is a quixotic project that will never work.

With the EU, the UK had at least one US-level advantage: the unfettered access to a gigantic market. Now, there's regulatory doubling, at the very least, if you want to sell or buy things in that market. I think you'd need some spectacular advantages to outbalance that, going forward - and I have no idea where they are supposed to be coming from. From a business perspective, the most perfect regulatory framework is inferior to a bad regulatory framework that allows you access to a much bigger market.

Access to the EU market was never really a big advantage for the UK because the EU's internal market never did much beyond physical goods, but the UK was/is strongest in services. Unifying trade in services never became a priority for the French/German controlled EU institutions, and was sometimes outright opposed by them, meaning the UK benefited far less than is commonly argued it was more like other countries having great access to the UK market but not vice-versa.

Moreover the EU had and still has a completely imperial attitude towards the UK, as they perceived leaving as impossible so figured they could do whatever they wanted to Britain. See how they were constantly attempting to screw with or outright steal the City financial industry, like by trying to forcibly relocate it to other areas of Europe. That sort of thing was also happening before the referendum even got started. Most people in the UK don't have a good view towards the EU for this sort of reason. Remain had to rely heavily on fear-based arguments in order to shore up the 'natural' level of positive EU support which would otherwise have been far too low (~a third, iirc).

"From a business perspective, the most perfect regulatory framework is inferior to a bad regulatory framework that allows you access to a much bigger market"

Yeah? Tell that to all the people and companies fleeing China after years of arguing that there were no limits to what made sense to do, to get access to the world's largest single market.

I don't think it's very hard for the UK to follow in America's footsteps. Most of the big economic differences are a combination of legal and cultural, not anything fundamental. US culture is to some extent a derivative of British culture after all!

If you can't see fundamental economic differences between the UK and US, I would caution you that, while it may not be visible from your vantage point in Andromeda, Jupiter is indeed larger than a duck, even if they seem more or less much-of-a-muchness when one has proper perspective.

When roughly 50% of the imports and exports of such a piddling island, services included, are directed towards the EU - obviously, from a very great distance, it makes no difference at all if those goods are subject to tariffs, and if the industries producing them get no input into the regulations they will have to adhere to.

If you were observing, say, from Pluto, you would probably note that the little smudge of the EU is a mite bigger than the little smudge of the UK, and 50% of the UK's import/export economy, while no big deal on the cosmic scale, probably matters a bit to the people who live there.